Monday, July 28, 2014

Predicting Your IQ and Sexual Orientation from Facebook Likes: Interview with the Man Who Made it Possible

Dr. Michal Kosinski leapt into
global public attention last year when his team at the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre designed an
algorithm that could use Facebook Likes alone to reliably
determine six million users’ private traits like their sexual
orientation, IQ, religious beliefs, life satisfaction, and personality traits—even
when the Likes seemingly had nothing to do with the traits in question. Since
then, this he has been consulted by the EU parliament about Internet issues, as well
as marketing and HR executives, boasting over 40 keynote speeches and lectures.

“My
research has actually been used to argue that the Internet is technically
illegal in the EU” he informs me, referring to a
wry case by Vesselin Popov that because businesses can use
snippets of data about customers’ online behavior to accurately infer so much
private information about them that it violates current EU laws requiring that
subjects explicitly give consent for businesses to collect information about
their ethnic origins, religious beliefs, sex lives, etc.

Such
information can be extremely valuable. In an
interview last year Michal said that it can be used to
predict people’s future action with reasonable accuracy “like on Minority
Report you can really predict what people will do in the future and where
incidents will most likely occur at a given time using archived and real-time
data of the environment. You can know that a person will be drunk and rowdy at
a given time even before that person knows about it! Moreover you will know
people better than they even know themselves- this is scary.”

Facebook certainly knows
many of its users quite well. “Facebook knows much more about citizens than
most governments do, in some regards.” Michal says to me, noting that
previously only very wealthy governments could afford to keep extensive files
on their citizens’ religious beliefs, sexual orientations, and other sorts of
information that Facebook’s algorithms can determine easily.

On the other hand,
however, he trusts large companies with this data more than he trusts
governments with it, though, arguing that companies are actually more
responsive to their customers’ concerns about use of their data than
governments are: “people are very angry about the NSA and, what? Does anything
change? The politicians distance themselves from it but they're not stopping it
because there are important limitations here like national security. Stopping
the NSA may make people happier, but what if next year you have another 9/11? Regardless
of whether extensive eavesdropping could have stopped it or not, those
politicians worked to stop the NSA would be in big, big trouble." On the
contrary, Michal believes that companies like Facebook will toe the line to
keep their customers happy not only to avoid losing customers in the short
term, but to avoid annoying them enough to inspire regulations on their
activities.

Michal hardly thinks
that these companies are without their own leverage, though, calling Facebook
and Google international monopolies that “have huge power. Imagine Google
changing the order of search results slightly to promote negative messages
about a presidential candidate and boom! Next election, Google could sway the
results by a few percentage points.One or few people
working in a private enterprise could sway the results of the election.” Though
Michal doesn’t mention it explicitly during our conversation, a study
last year by the Senior Research Psychologist at the American
Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology indeed provided strong
evidence that small alterations in search rankings could strongly influence
voting preferences.

He also admits that his
first reaction to hearing about Facebook publishing its experiments on altering
users’ emotions was discomfort, but says “while this is a perfectly human reaction
that I shared with many, we also have to realize that it is completely irrational.
And bashing Facebook for publishing this paper is not only irrational, but naive…..
Facebook is doing stuff like that anyway all the time. It's legal. Any second
there are hundreds and hundreds of experiments run on Facebook; many of them
are run automatically. People don't even touch the computer, they let the
computer generate a change in interfaces."

Michal says that
Facebook should be praised for the transparency of publishing their
experiments, for openly doing what governments and companies like Google do
quietly. The negative reaction to the publication will harm open and
transparent science in the field, he says, but it won’t prevent companies and
governments from conducting it secretly.

But he still considers
the sheer amount of data that these companies have collected to be concerning,
noting "It becomes dangerous that one company knows so much."

He also points out the
risk of personal data being available to an increasing number of parties, that
if combined with ever more accurate prediction algorithms could
effectively eliminate privacy and cause civil unrest. He explains with an
analogy “Take nuclear weapons; they are a big issue, but if only a handful of
governments have access to them, the problem is somewhat contained. If every
John Smith can have a nuclear weapon then then it increases the risk that someone will blow everything up. So for
example currently you need a lot of resources to determine one’s sexual
orientation, political views or religion, and only large institutions, such as
governments can afford it.

“If only governments
know you're gay in a country where it's illegal to be gay then maybe they will
use it against you, maybe not. It's dangerous but the weapon is in one hand
only, but now if everyone knows you're gay when it's illegal then it becomes
super dangerous because anyone can pull the trigger.

“If people’s intimate
traits and views can be revealed by anyone, this creates huge challenges. In my
view, not only democracy and freedom, but social cohesion, are to a large extent
based on the ability to withhold such information from others.”

The solution he
proposes is to allow everyone total control over their own data, including
online browsing behavior. As an alternative, customization could be handled
like NetFlix’s system for voluntarily providing information for
personalization. He agrees that this might cut into revenues somewhat, but
claims that it would be made up for with increased customer trust improving
engagement with services like Facebook’s, and decreasing the risk of
governments regulating them to their detriment.

Personally I must admit
that I was somewhat skeptical of this solution, but then I talked to the
leaders of a foundation with not only a plan to put it together, but an
impressive team and not insubstantial financial backing. I’ll post excerpts
from my interviews with them next week, but first: the architect behind the
Pentagon’s entrance into social media.

This
interview is one of a series that I am conducting for my forthcoming book. For
more excerpts of interviews with scientists, government officials, executives,
and other thought leaders shaping the future of social interaction subscribe now.

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